Environmental evasion
Subtitle: the literary, critical, and cultural politics of "Nature's Nation"
By: Lloyd Willis.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Albany, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 189
ISBN-13: 9781438432816
Subjects: American literature -- History and criticism; Environmentalism in literature; Human ecology in literature; Environmental policy in literature; Environmental literature -- History and criticism
Description: How do we reconcile the abstract reverence for the natural world central to American literary history, beginning with Ralph Waldo Emersons "Nature," with over a century and a half of widespread environmental destruction? Environmental Evasion examines the environmental implications of literary and cultural productions by writers from James Fennimore Cooper to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Zora Neale Hurston. Lloyd Wills provocatively argues that the environmentalist outlooks of Cooper and Longfellow were eclipsed by Ralph Waldo Emersons abstract, imperialist vision of nature. He demonstrates how many twentiety-century American writers have taken the Emersonian approach, participating in a silent but extremely powerful form of evasive environmental politics in ways in which they write about the natural world. Attentive to the inherent political dimensions of all texts, Environmental Evasion insists on the relevance of environmental history and politics to New Americanist approaches to the literary canon.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction:  American literature and environmental politics.  Chapter 1:  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the formation of American literature's core environmental values; title: Chapter 2:  James Fenimore Cooper, canon formation, and American literature's erasure of environmental anxiety; title: Chapter 3:  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the American canon's erasure of material nature; title: Chapter 4:  Willa Cather and John Steinbeck, environmental schizophrenia and monstrous ecology; title: Chapter 5:  Zora Neale Hurston, the power of Harlem, and the promise of Florida; title: Afterword:  Ernest Hemingway, and American literature's legacy of environmental disengagement.